I’m probably not alone in noticing a sharp decline in revenues from standard business activities on the internet — whether that’s from advertising, affiliate sales, or direct selling of products and services.

All the weather vanes are swinging south and, with forecasts that the credit crunch could last for two more years, may stay that way for some time.

How can we buck this trend and not only hold our own, but actually come out ahead? We should look at professional investors, especially the big, successful ones.

The Warren Buffetts and George Soros’s of this world build large cash reserves during bull markets. Buffett has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars and is looking seriously at Britain and Europe for bargain buys during the downturn. There are plenty of them.

For those of us with more modest resources, Soros perhaps is a better example. He it was who sold sterling “short” during the currency crisis of 1992. He is reported to have earned over a billion dollars in a few weeks.

Effectively he bet against the pound’s ability to remain in the European tied currency system — then called “the snake” or ERM — in the face of massive speculation against it.

He was right and did Britain a huge favour by scuppering the crazy political experiment. We owe it to him that the UK is not in the single currency, the eurozone, right now.

So what is “short selling” and how might it benefit internet businesses?

When you “buy long” on a stock or investment, it means buying it for an expected increase in price. But when you go short, you are anticipating a fall.

Short selling is also the selling of a stock that the seller doesn’t own. When you short sell a stock, your broker will lend it to you. The stock may come from the firm’s own inventory, from one of its clients, or from another brokerage firm. The shares are then sold and the proceeds credited to your account.

Now here’s the rub. At some point you must cover the short by buying back the shares and returning them to the broker. If, as you’ve gambled, the price drops, you can purchase them at a lower price and pocket the difference, minus brokerage fees. For example, if you could have predicted the ups and downs of the Microsoft-Yahoo skirmishes recently, you would have cleaned up.

Of course, if the price rises, you lose. Essentially this is about winning in a falling market. With money currently chasing every store of value, like gold, oil and certain other commodities, funds are draining away from many assets and valuations are falling — just look at your house price.

Talking to a trusted broker about short selling may well be a way to replace lost sales in medium-sized internet businesses. With falling markets set to continue, turning logic on its head may be the only way to stay afloat if things get really bad.

Any investment takes a lot of nerve of course — and single-mindedness. A few months ago I was intent on going long on gold. However, another call on my cash intervened and I forfeited the many thousands of dollars I might have made on the spectacular rise in the gold price to around $1000 an ounce.

Going short is one way to survive in a falling market. As sailors say, “any port in a storm.”

Note: This post is not intended as investment advice or to influence your investment choices in any way.

There’s quite a bit of chatter around about comments being separated from blog posts by various network services. Somehow this is said to diminish blogs as a folkish artform. Does that matter?

The 21st-century internet is the stuff of Quantum Mechanics. Everything is possible without limit, whatever we may think about the outcome. The Web is a vast array of small atoms, not large planets. Its laws are closer to magic than physics and can be said to exist only within the context of human thought.

Leaving that inevitability aside because we can’t influence it, I believe we should be more worried about small concerns in small cases.

A couple of months ago there was an explosion of comments on Twitter about the way an interview was conducted with a founder of Facebook by a hapless BusinessWeek reporter, who was deemed not to have done a great job. To read some A-list bloggers, you’d think Jesus had been crucified all over again.

The poor woman concerned must have felt the stigmata piercing her extremities.

As I commented on one blog, “If this is what passes for REALLY BIG NEWS on Twitter, God help us all.”

It’s the old, old story of mass hysteria breaking out on what seems to be the big question of the moment. If you don’t get involved, you’re somehow not quite alive. Even people not in the interview audience were screaming blue murder — apparently.

Now, I’m not going to have another go at Twitter. I actually admire Evan Williams and his business ethos. He deserves to succeed and he has many supporters.

I just wish the “wisdom of the crowd” was not being compressed into a few self-appointed Black Holes around various insignificant 1960s-style “happenings”.

We need the crowd to defeat tyrants, not to tyrannize ordinary folk just doing their jobs, no matter how awkwardly.

Here ends the sermon on no particular mount.

The twitter is beginning to sound a bit strangulated now. Like a flock of birds flying through a cloud of grapeshot.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon sending up Twitter mania

It seems both Hugh Macleod (the gaping void — see cartoon above) and Robert Scoble are coming off Twitter, that maddeningly insistent waster of time for busy professionals who regularly protest about email-overload but tweet happily throughout the day to thousands of “followers”. Jeremy Wright too has whipped the twittering hierglyphics off his blog. At last sense has returned to the Techmeme crowd.

It’s becoming clear that the much derided New York Times article last Sunday, which pictured exhausted bloggers stumbling to early graves, has had an effect. Here at Syntagma we responded to the piece by suggesting a flight from Twitter as a first step to sanity.

Does anyone in real life speak in batches of 140 characters? I thought not. It’s so obviously an artificial way of communicating. And the way each twit begins with @fredbloggs as if a gun is being fired at his head, is very disconcerting.

The whole thing has got out of hand and GapingVoid’s cartoon gets it in a nutshell.

The New York Times has a rather gloomy piece on how bloggers are dropping dead like flies, apparently overcome by the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

Personally, I’ve not known a blogger who has slumped lifeless over a keyboard (touch wood). I imagine people pass away at inconvenient moments in many professions. Blogging and writing from home must have its share of dicky tickers like any other walk of life.

However, the NYT has chapter and verse :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

From these few examples you would have to subtract the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment. However, a word of caution. Anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms. Journalists are not notorious for their alcohol consumption for nothing.

And try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

Methinks the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote a day or two ago.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

Syntagma’s advice : drop the Tweets, do the paid work efficiently — a three-hour morning should suffice — then get out of the house on a long Photowalk, or maybe to the golf course or coffee shop (preferably without a Hotspot), and forget about the Labours of Hercules. He was a mythical character and is not one to emulate.